by Laer Carroll
"Kill them all!" "Shoot the bastards!" "Hang them up by their balls!"
The monster waited until they had calmed enough to become quiet when she raised a hand.
"Most of them we will undoubtedly kill. But not by torture. I am an expert in evil, I hope you will agree. And I tell you that if you torture them to death, though they assuredly deserve it, it will stain you and haunt you for the rest...of...your...life."
Her fierce look and the gravity of her word silenced and calmed most of them. A few looked rebellious. She noted who they were.
"Now, we need to break up and come back here in an hour. Except for four of you to relieve the security crew. They have been eating their own lunch but listening over the intercom, so they've heard everything. But it's time for another swap of duty personnel. Every camera watcher needs to stay fresh or you'll miss something important. Such as me flying over the fence the way I did last night."
There! That last little semi-truth ought to have all sorts of useful effects.
There were more than enough volunteers to play security personnel. Sylvia picked two who looked competent and a couple who seemed iffy. The shaky ones should benefit from having something to occupy them and having role models to follow on the road to wellness.
Sylvia begged off answering any questions and took a couple of professed dog people to deal with the patrol dogs. The monster calmed the dogs with some esoteric biochemistry then, while the two women were getting acquainted with the animals, checked on the dog handler. She made sure he was healthy, turned him over onto his opposite side to avoid bed sores and the like, and left him lightly covered with a sheet.
However, she was unable to get away from the cottage right away. The two women and six dogs met her at the door, the dogs eager to get inside and see and smell their master.
The dogs jerked back and flattened themselves on the ground at her scent, whining. Sylvia walked past them and they jumped up and bounded inside. The dog people looked askance at the monster and hurried inside.
The next two hours back in the ballroom were spent discussing immediate and longer-range issues. Or often arguing. The monster kept quiet most of the time, only intervening when matters seemed to be getting too heated.
There was a lot of disagreement about when they could leave and where they would go and how, and how to treat the men.
Finally Sylvia stood up and got their attention.
"We obviously need to discuss these issues more, but I think we've made progress. For one, we've begun to know each other and organize in ways that best suit our skills and desires."
They had also vented a lot of anger and were well begun on thinking of the future, and thinking about it positively. This would go a long way toward healing their psychic wounds. One of the women, for instance, was already thinking about using her trust fund to start a delicatessen.
"One matter we can start on now: waking men and begin interrogating them. I suggest we work up to the ones who know most about where that money is and how to get to it, so we can cross-check what they say. But I also want to know who these bastards do business with and try to trace and recover women who've already been sold to them.
"Now, those of you on kitchen duty go there and start the evening meal. The rest of you, come with me to help carry the men to basement. Remember, treat them carefully, as much as you hate to. We want them undamaged for questioning."
It took more than an hour to get the 15 men down into the basement. Especially given the narrowness of the basement stairs it wasn't always an easy task, even with four women to each man and Sylvia with her enormous strength carrying one man. But finally it was done.
Meanwhile the kitchen staff had done a good job and everyone was able to sit down to a decent meal. As before, Sylvia monitored the starved women to make sure none ate too much and that their systems could handle the food.
It was almost 7:00 when everyone had eaten and all the preparations had been made. A fresh new security group was on watch in the security room. There were six of them because those in the security room would be able to watch the interrogation over the video cameras in the basement, and there also had to be eyes on the security cameras placed around the insides of the compound.
Everyone else except Sylvia were in the big ballroom watching the events unfolding in the basement over two big video screens. She was in the basement.
Finally Sylvia stood amid the men lying all about the floor. She looked up one of the video pickups and said, "It's show-time, folks."
Chapter 34 - Interrogation
She walked to stand next to the light switch.
The floor was covered with comatose men. The room still reeked of feces and urine, and a few of the men's bowels and bladders had added to the aroma. The bright neon lights high above limned their bodies cruelly. They had been stripped naked.
"Are you ready?" the monster said to the hidden sound pickups.
"Ready," came over the loudspeaker. "We'll start the DVD when you say so."
Sylvia tripped the light switch to Off, removed her camo tee shirt and shorts, and put them on the floor near the light switch, folded neatly. Then she triggered the change to her warform.
As she felt the change take place she intervened and made a few changes. The new version would be less bulky but no less dangerous or scary. And she would be able to talk, which had not been possible with the first version.
Change complete the monster said to the darkness "Start recording." She flipped the lights on.
All the women watching her were seeing her complete warform for the first time. She had no doubt most at least drew a sudden breath. A few might have cried out.
Sylvia walked over to where the cook lay. He was a chef-level little old man who looked like a stereotypical Mafioso. He seemed never to leave the compound, but the "trained" women had not been out of the basement more than a few weeks and couldn't be sure. Especially since they had not been given free rein of the compound.
Sylvia guessed he was as much a captive as the women and hoped he could be persuaded to work for them for the few days the women stayed in the mansion.
She touched a bare foot with one of her own clawed feet. That was enough contact to give a command to his body to wake up.
His eyes twitched, opened, quickly clenched tighter shut at the neon glare from overhead. He put a forearm over his eyes. Rolled onto his back, groaning. He was surely stiff and sore from lying in the same position for so long.
Groaning more he sat up and opened his eyes. To see the matte-black warform standing near his feet, her massive arms crossed.
He gave a yell and scuttled backward, his eyes locked on her. Only to bump into a body lying nearby. He glanced at it, then screamed. The comatose body must have seemed dead, as would all the other bodies lying about the room.
He scrambled up and ran from her. But the monster was between him and the door. He ended up against the furthest wall, back and arms flattened against it.
Sylvia had not moved from her location, was as still as a statue, her breath too shallow to be noticeable from his distance. He calmed marginally, took in details of her body: the massively obvious muscles, the claws on her hands and feet, the heavy brow ridges which protected her eyes. She had no obvious ears, breasts, or sex. Her nose was a heavily protected near-beak, her mouth a slit.
"What is your name?" the monster said. Her voice hissed and rumbled but should have been intelligible. The man said nothing, did nothing, beyond widening his eyes and increasing his breath rate.
"Come, man," she said, walking toward him. "What is your name?"
He cringed, said something garbled. She stopped about six feet away from him.
"Say again."
"Felix. "
"Felix what? Don't make me pull it from you." She held up a clawed hand, the three-inch claws slender and curved and obviously sharp.
The thought of what those claws could pull from him opened floodgates of speech.
"Felix Lebeau. Ple
ase don't hurt me. Please don't kill me." And more in that vein.
"Quiet!"
He shut his mouth. He was shivering violently and his legs seemed about to fail him. If he didn't faint first.
"Sit down."
He obeyed, though it was more like sliding down the wall. The monster gracefully squatted and sat cross-legged before him.
"What did you do here? Do not lie. I will know it."
He began to talk, describing his job, his schedule, other matters. It became to seem more likely that he was a captive.
"That's enough," Sylvia said. "I want you to continue this with the two women who will come for you in a few minutes. Do not try to escape from them. If you succeeded I would find you. And I would eat you.
"Now, who were your helpers in the kitchen? Get up and go point them out to me."
To the sound pickups overhead Sylvia said, "Two questioners. Now."
The cook rose and on shaky legs led her to two men near where he had been. They were the helpers she had guessed and others had confirmed were in truth his helpers.
He pointed to one. "Please, this is my son. He is innocent of any wrongs."
He pointed at a teenager of perhaps 15 years.
Two women, both wearing pistols in holsters and not hiding their hatred, came down the stairs to the basement within minutes. They cuffed his wrists together in front with plastic wrap ties, tightly enough be secure but not so much they cut off the blood supply.
When the door closed behind the captors and captive Sylvia woke the young man more gently than his father. As she had guessed the two had been coerced by the slavers, held hostage by the father's wife and other children in Iguazú City a dozen miles to the north along the river. Only one of them was ever let out of the compound at a time to buy grocery supplies and then only with a chaperon who drove them.
This time she told the two women who came for the young man to put him with his father and ask them questions jointly. She treated the third cook similarly.
So it went for two more hours. Then the makeshift holding cells were full and half the unbusy women were busy interrogating the men and recording information.
Only five men were left when Sylvia turned off the lights, changed to her Maria persona, dressed, and left the basement.
In the security room she checked to make sure the people on duty were alert and that there were no obvious threats, them left for the boat house. Twilight still faintly painted the western sky when arrived.
The monster wired bricks to the wrists and ankles of the corpses, placed a large tarp on the floor of a medium-sized motor boat, and loaded the corpses into the boat. She took the boat out onto the water, lit by stars and a crescent moon, and heaved them overboard near where all the other dead from the mansion had been discarded.
Her camo tee shirt and her shorts had been stained, but a dip in the water now would fix that. Sylvia restarted the boat and drove sedately further into the lake where she would not be bothered by nearness to the watery graveyard. Then she dove overboard.
There was the familiar drowning feeling and then the water coursed through her and out her gills as she changed to her shallow-water seaform. Her radar-like sense opened up a vision of the lake bottom and its quilted complexity and its plants and all the other water life about her. Here she was one of many thousands of lives and all her troubles washed away. She began to dart and frolic through the water, diving deep and rushing upward to erupt out of the water and crash down onto her sides with huge splashes onto the surface.
Her exuberance calmed after a bit and she swam leisurely back to the boat.
This was the first leisure she'd had since she had launched herself over the fence early this morning to enter combat. She recalled the brief moments of furious massacre she had inflicted upon the gunmen. And, as many avengers with a conscience had before, she found that the acts did not ease one's pain.
She felt no guilt. The men HAD stood between her and rescue of the kidnapped women. There could have been no reasoning, no negotiation with them for a peaceful conclusion. Killing them had been necessary. Merely necessary.
As had been taking charge of the women's welfare afterward, complicated and difficult as it was turning out to be.
She reflected wryly about how innocent she had been in the years of her quest for vengeance. She had dreamed of an orgy of slaughter, after which she would have returned home happy. Not the difficulties she now found herself in.
She had to help these women get home safe. Then she had to do the same for all the women who had been sold as far back as she could find from the men in the mansion and from their records. There was no excitement at the thought, no obsession. Only duty. It would take weeks, she supposed. She would have to take an unpaid sabbatical to manage it.
Inwardly she laughed at herself. Poor superwoman. Poor avenging angel.
She surfaced to change to her airform, eeled aboard the boat, started it, and turned it toward shore.
It was mid-evening by this time and all the women had been up for a long and stressful day. That much of the excitement was positive did not lessen the stress.
She announced that there would be no more interrogations. Most of them were done anyway. She told the three cooks to go to their rooms and stay there till the morning. She took the remaining awake men to the basement, put them into a coma, eased them down onto the floor, and removed the plastic ties cinched to their wrists so they would not restrict blood flow. She detailed a few of the women to bring pillows and blankets to cover the men. They might still be useful.
In the basement she checked that the men were healthy. Then with a couple of helpers she turned the men onto their opposite sides and treated them to pillows and blankets as well.
In the ballroom everyone had drinks and some had snacks. The starved ate most of the food but were abiding by her command that they not stuff themselves and make themselves sick.
She stood up and said, "Good job, everyone. You're all tired, so we'll keep this brief.
"The remaining five men to interrogate are the ones who know where the money is and who their customers were. Several of the men we talked to today know the password to the computers, however, so we could probably get that information ourselves if we had to. But we should not have to.
"I want to repeat: leave the bastards downstairs alone. Their days are numbered, but we'll all together decide what those numbers are. Not any one of you.
"As most of you know there is good news. The cooks were prisoners too, and they'll take over most of the food preparation for the next few days. I'll check the food to make sure we're not mistaken in them and they've not poisoned the food. I'm not letting any them leave or make a phone call. We don't want any alarms raised until all of us are gone.
"I don't think there will be, not soon anyway. We'll be giving the cooks a generous 'severance' allowance and they'll want to protect that."
There was some argument over that, and Sylvia and the women who'd interrogated the cooks had to explain why the men were innocent—or as innocent as they could be in such a desperate situation.
"Now all those scheduled to be on duty stay behind for a few minutes. The rest of you can go catch up on sleep. Or whatever. Try to get a full night's sleep. We'll have a busy day tomorrow."
Not surprisingly a lot of women stayed around for a while chatting, likely because she was here and gave them a safe feeling. Others said they would go to the lounge on the second floor for a while.
Sylvia addressed the people assigned security duty, making sure they knew when they would be needed and where, and had clocks to set to make sure they did not miss their duty.
"Where will you be, Maria?" Issa wanted to know. "In case we need you."
"I'm going to sleep in the security room so they can wake me as quickly as possible. But I'm going to do a patrol outside the perimeter in a little bit, and again about 3:00. I'll see you in the morning."
Chapter 35 - Walkaround
A couple of ho
urs before midnight Sylvia left the compound by the front gate. It was opened remotely from the security center and closed behind her with a muted clash.
She walked north on the dusty blacktop road leading to the highway until the lights illuminating the front edge of the compound dimmed, then turned to wave at anyone watching her over the video cameras. She turned to the right, eastward, and walked across the grassy verge of the road into deeper grass at the edge of the forest. She pushed through screening bushes at the forest's edge, entered the forest, and walked until the light of the stars and crescent moon failed. She stopped.
Standing literally as still as a statue she slowly changed to her newest version of her warform. The original version, she was convinced, had been a copy of a creature once living many light years away on some alien planet. The newer version had more human qualities, most especially human speech. It was still at home in a jungle and so was at home here, though "here" was not a jungle but a dense forest.
Her eyes, already more-than-humanly dark-adapted, became even more sensitive. Two spots above her armored brow ridges resolved into being and began sending an infrared view of her surroundings to her brain. The image was not as sharp as that of her eyes but added detail eyes could not see. The two images merged.
Sounds became louder, though not loud. She heard crickets and other less-noisy insects, the slow wind in the tree tops, creaking branches, the occasional swish and hum of automobiles a few miles north on the highway. Far off an owl solemnly spoke. Small animals moved furtively through the underbrush, sparse because there was so little sunlight during the day but there nevertheless.
Scents came to her of all she saw and heard, of plants, animals, insects. The genes in the cells borne by the air to her nose unwound themselves to her inner biochemical laboratory, giving her enormous detail about the origins of those cells.
She moved north toward the highway. Near it the monster heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. She stilled, waited till it went past her position. Then she made a wide circle around the compound, then a smaller one.